OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
CPGAN: Full-Spectrum Content-Parsing Generative Adversarial Networks for Text-to-Image Synthesis
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Typical methods for text-to-image synthesis seek to design effective generative architecture to model the text-to-image mapping directly. It is fairly arduous due to the cross-modality translation. In this paper we circumvent this problem by focusing on parsing the content of both the input text and the synthesized image thoroughly to model the text-to-image consistency in the semantic level. Particularly, we design a memory structure to parse the textual content by exploring semantic correspondence between each word in the vocabulary to its various visual contexts across relevant images during text encoding. Meanwhile, the synthesized image is parsed to learn its semantics in an object-aware manner. Moreover, we customize a conditional discriminator to model the fine-grained correlations between words and image sub-regions to push for the text-image semantic alignment. Extensive experiments on COCO dataset manifest that our model advances the state-of-the-art performance significantly (from 35.69 to 52.73 in Inception Score).
Reconstructing Embedded Graphs from Persistence Diagrams
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2020
Year: 2020

The persistence diagram (PD) is an increasingly popular topological descriptor. By encoding the size and prominence of topological features at varying scales, the PD provides important geometric and topological information about a space. Recent work has shown that well-chosen (finite) sets of PDs can differentiate between geometric simplicial complexes, providing a method for representing complex shapes using a finite set of descriptors. A related inverse problem is the following: given a set of PDs (or an oracle we can query for persistence diagrams), what is underlying geometric simplicial complex? In this paper, we present an algorithm for reconstructing embedded graphs in $\mathbb{R}^d$ (plane graphs in $\mathbb{R}^2$) with $n$ vertices from $n^2 - n + d + 1$ directional (augmented) PDs. Additionally, we empirically validate the correctness and time-complexity of our algorithm in $\mathbb{R}^2$ on randomly generated plane graphs using our implementation, and explain the numerical limitations of implementing our algorithm.
Slim Fly: A Cost Effective Low-Diameter Network Topology
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce a high-performance cost-effective network topology called Slim Fly that approaches the theoretically optimal network diameter. Slim Fly is based on graphs that approximate the solution to the degree-diameter problem. We analyze Slim Fly and compare it to both traditional and state-of-the-art networks. Our analysis shows that Slim Fly has significant advantages over other topologies in latency, bandwidth, resiliency, cost, and power consumption. Finally, we propose deadlock-free routing schemes and physical layouts for large computing centers as well as a detailed cost and power model. Slim Fly enables constructing cost effective and highly resilient datacenter and HPC networks that offer low latency and high bandwidth under different HPC workloads such as stencil or graph computations.
Detecting Incorrect Behavior of Cloud Databases as an Outsider
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2020
Year: 2020

Cloud DBs offer strong properties, including serializability, sometimes called the gold standard database correctness property. But cloud DBs are complicated black boxes, running in a different administrative domain from their clients; thus, clients might like to know whether the DBs are meeting their contract. A core difficulty is that the underlying problem here, namely verifying serializability, is NP-complete. Nevertheless, we hypothesize that on real-world workloads, verifying serializability is tractable, and we treat the question as a systems problem, for the first time. We build Cobra, which tames the underlying search problem by blending a new encoding of the problem, hardware acceleration, and a careful choice of a suitable SMT solver. cobra also introduces a technique to address the challenge of garbage collection in this context. cobra improves over natural baselines by at least 10x in the problem size it can handle, while imposing modest overhead on clients.
Identification of abrupt stiffness changes of structures with tuned mass dampers under sudden events
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2020
Year: 2020

This paper presents a recursive system identification method for multi-degree-of-freedom (MDoF) structures with tuned mass dampers (TMDs) considering abrupt stiffness changes in case of sudden events, such as earthquakes. Due to supplementary non-classical damping of the TMDs, the system identification of MDoF+TMD systems disposes a challenge, in particular, in case of sudden events. This identification methods may be helpful for structural health monitoring of MDoF structures controlled by TMDs. A new adaptation formulation of the unscented Kalman filter allows the identification method to track abrupt stiffness changes. The paper, firstly, describes the theoretical background of the proposed system identification method and afterwards presents three parametric studies regarding the performance of the method. The first study shows the augmented state identification by the presented system identification method applied on a MDoF+TMD system. In this study, the abrupt stiffness changes of the system are successfully detected and localized under earthquake, impulse and white noise excitations. The second study investigates the effects of the state covariance and its relevance for the system identification of MDoF+TMD systems. The results of this study show the necessity of an adaptive definition of the state covariance as applied in the proposed method. The third study investigates the effects of modeling on the performance of the identification method. Mathematical models with discretization of different orders of convergence and system noise levels are studied. The results show that, in particular, MDoF+TMD systems require higher order mathematical models for an accurate identification of abrupt changes.
Mean field theory for deep dropout networks: digging up gradient backpropagation deeply
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years, the mean field theory has been applied to the study of neural networks and has achieved a great deal of success. The theory has been applied to various neural network structures, including CNNs, RNNs, Residual networks, and Batch normalization. Inevitably, recent work has also covered the use of dropout. The mean field theory shows that the existence of depth scales that limit the maximum depth of signal propagation and gradient backpropagation. However, the gradient backpropagation is derived under the gradient independence assumption that weights used during feed forward are drawn independently from the ones used in backpropagation. This is not how neural networks are trained in a real setting. Instead, the same weights used in a feed-forward step needs to be carried over to its corresponding backpropagation. Using this realistic condition, we perform theoretical computation on linear dropout networks and a series of experiments on dropout networks. Our empirical results show an interesting phenomenon that the length gradients can backpropagate for a single input and a pair of inputs are governed by the same depth scale. Besides, we study the relationship between variance and mean of statistical metrics of the gradient and shown an emergence of universality. Finally, we investigate the maximum trainable length for deep dropout networks through a series of experiments using MNIST and CIFAR10 and provide a more precise empirical formula that describes the trainable length than original work.
An End-to-End Dialogue State Tracking System with Machine Reading Comprehension and Wide & Deep Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

This paper describes our approach in DSTC 8 Track 4: Schema-Guided Dialogue State Tracking. The goal of this task is to predict the intents and slots in each user turn to complete the dialogue state tracking (DST) based on the information provided by the task's schema. Different from traditional stage-wise DST, we propose an end-to-end DST system to avoid error accumulation between the dialogue turns. The DST system consists of a machine reading comprehension (MRC) model for non-categorical slots and a Wide & Deep model for categorical slots. As far as we know, this is the first time that MRC and Wide & Deep model are applied to DST problem in a fully end-to-end way. Experimental results show that our framework achieves an excellent performance on the test dataset including 50% zero-shot services with a joint goal accuracy of 0.8652 and a slot tagging F1-Score of 0.9835.
Instance-wise Depth and Motion Learning from Monocular Videos
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

We present an end-to-end joint training framework that explicitly models 6-DoF motion of multiple dynamic objects, ego-motion and depth in a monocular camera setup without supervision. Our technical contributions are three-fold. First, we propose a differentiable forward rigid projection module that plays a key role in our instance-wise depth and motion learning. Second, we design an instance-wise photometric and geometric consistency loss that effectively decomposes background and moving object regions. Lastly, we introduce a new auto-annotation scheme to produce video instance segmentation maps that will be utilized as input to our training pipeline. These proposed elements are validated in a detailed ablation study. Through extensive experiments conducted on the KITTI dataset, our framework is shown to outperform the state-of-the-art depth and motion estimation methods. Our code and dataset will be available at https://github.com/SeokjuLee/Insta-DM.
Adversarial symmetric GANs: bridging adversarial samples and adversarial networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Generative adversarial networks have achieved remarkable performance on various tasks but suffer from training instability. Despite many training strategies proposed to improve training stability, this issue remains as a challenge. In this paper, we investigate the training instability from the perspective of adversarial samples and reveal that adversarial training on fake samples is implemented in vanilla GANs, but adversarial training on real samples has long been overlooked. Consequently, the discriminator is extremely vulnerable to adversarial perturbation and the gradient given by the discriminator contains non-informative adversarial noises, which hinders the generator from catching the pattern of real samples. Here, we develop adversarial symmetric GANs (AS-GANs) that incorporate adversarial training of the discriminator on real samples into vanilla GANs, making adversarial training symmetrical. The discriminator is therefore more robust and provides more informative gradient with less adversarial noise, thereby stabilizing training and accelerating convergence. The effectiveness of the AS-GANs is verified on image generation on CIFAR-10 , CelebA, and LSUN with varied network architectures. Not only the training is more stabilized, but the FID scores of generated samples are consistently improved by a large margin compared to the baseline. The bridging of adversarial samples and adversarial networks provides a new approach to further develop adversarial networks.
Community detection in node-attributed social networks: a survey
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Community detection is a fundamental problem in social network analysis consisting in unsupervised dividing social actors (nodes in a social graph) with certain social connections (edges in a social graph) into densely knitted and highly related groups with each group well separated from the others. Classical approaches for community detection usually deal only with network structure and ignore features of its nodes (called node attributes), although many real-world social networks provide additional actors' information such as interests. It is believed that the attributes may clarify and enrich the knowledge about the actors and give sense to the communities. This belief has motivated the progress in developing community detection methods that use both the structure and the attributes of network (i.e. deal with a node-attributed graph) to yield more informative and qualitative results. During the last decade many such methods based on different ideas have appeared. Although there exist partial overviews of them, a recent survey is a necessity as the growing number of the methods may cause repetitions in methodology and uncertainty in practice. In this paper we aim at describing and clarifying the overall situation in the field of community detection in node-attributed social networks. Namely, we perform an exhaustive search of known methods and propose a classification of them based on when and how structure and attributes are fused. We not only give a description of each class but also provide general technical ideas behind each method in the class. Furthermore, we pay attention to available information which methods outperform others and which datasets and quality measures are used for their evaluation. Basing on the information collected, we make conclusions on the current state of the field and disclose several problems that seem important to be resolved in future.
Explainability and Adversarial Robustness for RNNs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) yield attractive properties for constructing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) for network data. With the rise of ubiquitous Machine Learning (ML) systems, malicious actors have been catching up quickly to find new ways to exploit ML vulnerabilities for profit. Recently developed adversarial ML techniques focus on computer vision and their applicability to network traffic is not straightforward: Network packets expose fewer features than an image, are sequential and impose several constraints on their features. We show that despite these completely different characteristics, adversarial samples can be generated reliably for RNNs. To understand a classifier's potential for misclassification, we extend existing explainability techniques and propose new ones, suitable particularly for sequential data. Applying them shows that already the first packets of a communication flow are of crucial importance and are likely to be targeted by attackers. Feature importance methods show that even relatively unimportant features can be effectively abused to generate adversarial samples. Since traditional evaluation metrics such as accuracy are not sufficient for quantifying the adversarial threat, we propose the Adversarial Robustness Score (ARS) for comparing IDSs, capturing a common notion of adversarial robustness, and show that an adversarial training procedure can significantly and successfully reduce the attack surface.
Uncertainty-sensitive Learning and Planning with Ensembles
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We propose a reinforcement learning framework for discrete environments in which an agent makes both strategic and tactical decisions. The former manifests itself through the use of value function, while the latter is powered by a tree search planner. These tools complement each other. The planning module performs a local \textit{what-if} analysis, which allows to avoid tactical pitfalls and boost backups of the value function. The value function, being global in nature, compensates for inherent locality of the planner. In order to further solidify this synergy, we introduce an exploration mechanism with two distinctive components: uncertainty modelling and risk measurement. To model the uncertainty we use value function ensembles, and to reflect risk we use propose several functionals that summarize the implied by the ensemble. We show that our method performs well on hard exploration environments: Deep-sea, toy Montezuma's Revenge, and Sokoban. In all the cases, we obtain speed-up in learning and boost in performance.
Questions to Guide the Future of Artificial Intelligence Research
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

The field of machine learning has focused, primarily, on discretized sub-problems (i.e. vision, speech, natural language) of intelligence. While neuroscience tends to be observation heavy, providing few guiding theories. It is unlikely that artificial intelligence will emerge through only one of these disciplines. Instead, it is likely to be some amalgamation of their algorithmic and observational findings. As a result, there are a number of problems that should be addressed in order to select the beneficial aspects of both fields. In this article, we propose leading questions to guide the future of artificial intelligence research. There are clear computational principles on which the brain operates. The problem is finding these computational needles in a haystack of biological complexity. Biology has clear constraints but by not using it as a guide we are constraining ourselves.
Deep Automodulators
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We introduce a new category of generative autoencoders called automodulators. These networks can faithfully reproduce individual real-world input images like regular autoencoders, but also generate a fused sample from an arbitrary combination of several such images, allowing instantaneous 'style-mixing' and other new applications. An automodulator decouples the data flow of decoder operations from statistical properties thereof and uses the latent vector to modulate the former by the latter, with a principled approach for mutual disentanglement of decoder layers. Prior work has explored similar decoder architecture with GANs, but their focus has been on random sampling. A corresponding autoencoder could operate on real input images. For the first time, we show how to train such a general-purpose model with sharp outputs in high resolution, using novel training techniques, demonstrated on four image data sets. Besides style-mixing, we show state-of-the-art results in autoencoder comparison, and visual image quality nearly indistinguishable from state-of-the-art GANs. We expect the automodulator variants to become a useful building block for image applications and other data domains.
Can Agents Learn by Analogy? An Inferable Model for PAC Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Model-based reinforcement learning algorithms make decisions by building and utilizing a model of the environment. However, none of the existing algorithms attempts to infer the dynamics of any state-action pair from known state-action pairs before meeting it for sufficient times. We propose a new model-based method called Greedy Inference Model (GIM) that infers the unknown dynamics from known dynamics based on the internal spectral properties of the environment. In other words, GIM can "learn by analogy". We further introduce a new exploration strategy which ensures that the agent rapidly and evenly visits unknown state-action pairs. GIM is much more computationally efficient than state-of-the-art model-based algorithms, as the number of dynamic programming operations is independent of the environment size. Lower sample complexity could also be achieved under mild conditions compared against methods without inferring. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of GIM in a variety of real-world tasks.
Deep Learning via Dynamical Systems: An Approximation Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We build on the dynamical systems approach to deep learning, where deep residual networks are idealized as continuous-time dynamical systems, from the approximation perspective. In particular, we establish general sufficient conditions for universal approximation using continuous-time deep residual networks, which can also be understood as approximation theories in $L^p$ using flow maps of dynamical systems. In specific cases, rates of approximation in terms of the time horizon are also established. Overall, these results reveal that composition function approximation through flow maps present a new paradigm in approximation theory and contributes to building a useful mathematical framework to investigate deep learning.
Emotion Recognition Using Wearables: A Systematic Literature Review Work in progress
Venue: arXiv cs.HC 2020
Year: 2020

Wearables like smartwatches or wrist bands equipped with pervasive sensors enable us to monitor our physiological signals. In this study, we address the question whether they can help us to recognize our emotions in our everyday life for ubiquitous computing. Using the systematic literature review, we identified crucial research steps and discussed the main limitations and problems in the domain.
ET-USB: Transformer-Based Sequential Behavior Modeling for Inbound Customer Service
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep learning models with attention mechanisms have achieved exceptional results for many tasks, including language tasks and recommendation systems. Whereas previous studies have emphasized allocation of phone agents, we focused on inbound call prediction for customer service. A common method of analyzing user history behaviors is to extract all types of aggregated feature over time, but that method may fail to detect users' behavioral sequences. Therefore, we created a new approach, ET-USB, that incorporates users' sequential and nonsequential features; we apply the powerful Transformer encoder, a self-attention network model, to capture the information underlying user behavior sequences. ET-USB is helpful in various business scenarios at Cathay Financial Holdings. We conducted experiments to test the proposed network structure's ability to process various dimensions of behavior data; the results suggest that ET-USB delivers results superior to those of delivered by other deep-learning models.
Soft Q Network
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Deep Q Network (DQN) is a very successful algorithm, yet the inherent problem of reinforcement learning, i.e. the exploit-explore balance, remains. In this work, we introduce entropy regularization into DQN and propose SQN. We find that the backup equation of soft Q learning can enjoy the corrective feedback if we view the soft backup as policy improvement in the form of Q, instead of policy evaluation. We show that Soft Q Learning with Corrective Feedback (SQL-CF) underlies the on-plicy nature of SQL and the equivalence of SQL and Soft Policy Gradient (SPG). With these insights, we propose an on-policy version of deep Q learning algorithm, i.e. Q On-Policy (QOP). We experiment with QOP on a self-play environment called Google Research Football (GRF). The QOP algorithm exhibits great stability and efficiency in training GRF agents.
Image Outpainting and Harmonization using Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Although the inherently ambiguous task of predicting what resides beyond all four edges of an image has rarely been explored before, we demonstrate that GANs hold powerful potential in producing reasonable extrapolations. Two outpainting methods are proposed that aim to instigate this line of research: the first approach uses a context encoder inspired by common inpainting architectures and paradigms, while the second approach adds an extra post-processing step using a single-image generative model. This way, the hallucinated details are integrated with the style of the original image, in an attempt to further boost the quality of the result and possibly allow for arbitrary output resolutions to be supported.